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Food printing, something so simple that can offer so many opportunities. All you need is your food of choice, some paint and paper or if you want to make it more complex then you can include paint brushes, sponges and safety knives.

The many opportunities of food printing:

🍎 Healthy eating – Food printing is a great opportunity to talk about healthy eating, what food is healthy and what food is not. Use fruit and vegetables to do the printing, talk about what they are, their colour and shape. You could also talk about taste and smell, try them before you start the painting. You could also include healthy and less healthy foods and ask them to group them.

🍏 Kitchen safety and hygiene – Food printing is a great opportunity to get the children’s safety knives out if your setting has them, let the children cut the fruit themselves. It gives them the chance to take supervised risk and learn about kitchen safety. You can also talk about hygiene, getting the children to wash their hands first and washing the food.

🍊 Colour – Any painting activity gives us the chance to talk about colour, Food printing gives us the opportunity to talk about colours of foods the children like and eat on a regular basis, as well as the food children are using to print. You can talk about foods that the children eat at home, including culture specific food. The great thing about painting is it also gives us the chance to mix different colours together and see how they change and talk about this change.

🍅 Maths – Cutting food up means we go from having 1 piece of food, to 2 pieces, 4 pieces etc. Cutting food up gives children the chance to count alone or in a group, using number names in sequence. For older children you can use food to teach sums or fractions. We can also use food to talk about shapes, what shape is the food and what shapes can we make on paper with them. If your using potatoes for printing you can carve shapes into them before you start printing.

🍆 Using tools – As well as using safety knives, you can include other tools such as paint brushes and sponges to do the actual painting, all of these will help with fine motor skills development.

🌽 More than just paint – You don’t have to limit your printing to paint, you can also use play dough to print shapes into. If you use salt dough you can cook it and keep the imprints and paint them, they’d make a nice gifts for parents and grandparents.

I hope this will inspire you to use food in a different way today. I would love to hear some ideas on other activities that you do with food in your homes and settings?